Virginia Woolf

Highlights from the Archives

How in the world, you may find yourself thinking, can the delicate but overarticulated psyche of Virginia Woolf withstand yet another exhumation? Can there possibly be any gold left to extract from the overmined precincts of Bloomsbury?

"How queer," Virginia Woolf once observed, "to have so many selves." In her novels and essays, not to mention nearly 4,000 letters and a 30-volume diary, Woolf left behind a voluminous anatomy of self, and in the years since her 1941 suicide, biographers and critics have created a succession of further portraits.

"One short choppy wave after another'' was the phrase Virginia Woolf used to characterize the regularity and brevity of her reviews in The Times Literary Supplement; but even in the turbid waters of journalism, there are occasions when the wind is at her back, her thought unfurls itself, and she sails calmly toward the open sea.

Anyone confronting this collection of Virginia Woolf's essays - the first of a projected series that will include all her nonfiction pieces -could be forgiven for sighing a small sigh. Haven't we already got enough Bloomsbury material to keep us going? Will the line trail on to the last tremor of doom?

Virginia Woolf was a multifarious creature - fluent, iconoclastic, vulnerable, savage, high-minded, low-minded, and intermittently insane. The youngest daughter of a dogmatic, Victorian father, Leslie Stephens, she lost her mother, her brother, and her half-sister while still young and these deaths made terrible breaches on her psyche.